Sorted Deferred Shading for Production Path Tracing

Abstract:
Ray-traced global illumination is becoming widespread. However, incoherent ray traversal and shading has traditionally limited ray tracing to scenes that fit in memory. To combat these issues, we introduce a sorting strategy for large, potentially out-of-core ray batches, and we sort and defer shading of ray hits. As a result, we achieve perfectly coherent shading and texture access, removing the need for a shading cache.